Hi Skunks,
Have been following the thread on the frustrations faced by KCPE candidates and parents when trying to access the results online and via SMS.
This is not unique to KNEC, it happens all the time to ATM bridge systems, Online transactions processing, SMS Based systems especially of late the MPESA.

So what is the problem?

Very simple, designers and developers of these systems do not understand, are not aware or choose to ignore the Queue Theory principles!!

I will use a very simple example to illustrate the point.
Imaging a queue in the bank waiting to be served by one cashier. If the policy of the bank is that a customer must be served within 10 mins, then the logical thing to do is to know when to turn away a customer who if they join the queue, will not be served within 10 mins. This is better than have all thousands of customers not served within 10 mins as per policy.......and will not kill the cashier!!

In short, it is time developers started taking queuing theory seriously when developing these kinds of systems.

Shad